So back in April, I wrote about a body interface project that I worked on called weBlimp. So in the time since then, the weBlimp team has brought it from a final project in a class, to an academic conference presentation, and now to an Olympic event!

So to update, in October, we were at UC Berkeley to present the concepts behind weBlimp at the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2009 Conference. The conference was great. It really has me considering grad school now. I also really enjoyed checking out San Francisco and the Bay Area.

A month or two after, we were asked by our University and the City of Surrey to showcase weBlimp during the 2010 Winter Olympics! Currently, we are working on building of a 'weBlimp 2.0' of higher quality and robustness, in preparation for its installation at the Surrey Holland Park Olympic Celebration Site. The installation will be showcased during the Olympics from February 17-21st.

Huzzah.I posted earlier, a few months ago, some slides from presentations at the Interaction'09 conference put on by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). They have recently uploaded their videos of the talks from the conference online. Check them out at http://library.ixda.org/ or on their Vimeo profile. Great videos - very enlightening!

Although, I was watching their discussion panel on hiring the next gen of Interaction Designers, and was deeply surprised that they didnt mention SIAT in their discussions. They talk about needing more (10,000) Interaction Designers, how current programs are small and can only output 15 students a year in small two year programs; they talk about Bachelors and Masters in this field; they talk about how they need people who have the ability to work with people from different fields and can do design thinking. SIAT, who by the way HOSTED the conference, has almost 800 students at present with graduates since 2003, offers full Bachelors, Masters, and PhDs, and produces amazing students who work hard and are great designers, and amazingly talented. Everything they were talking about was right in front of them.

Today I watched a screening of Gary Hustwit's film Objectified about industrial design and the design of everyday objects.

First thing I learned:Japanese toothpicks are an amazing piece of etiquette design!In the movie, Andrew Blauvelt revels that the ends of these toothpicks can be broken off. Why? Well first to simply indicate that they toothpick has been used. But also it can be used as a rest to keep the tip of your toothpick hygienically off the surface of the table. Awesome.

IDEO was working on a toothbrush design to make toothbrushes less disposable and more sustainable. Something that 'gets better with time' and is infinitely reusable. That one wooden handle looked nice, I wouldn't mind trying that out.

They talked kinda briefly about Interaction Design, with Bill Mogridge. But only briefly skimmed it and not explaining it to anyone. Afterwards during the Q&A with the director, Gary was hinting that he is thinking about a third design documentary (first was Helvetica, second is this one, Objectified). I hope his next film will delve into Interaction Design.

My favorite quote from the film:

[As a child,] All of my dreams were about the future.

I don't remember who it was by, perhaps Karim Rashid (but I generally find him too elitist).

One of my Body Interface projects is the weBlimp. weBlimp is a social, crowd controlled flying airship. It conceptually miniaturizes participants and places them inside the gondola of a remote controlled blimp.Completion of our weBlimp project video, as well as the conference paper, is now done! Check out the documentation video for details on the project:

Awesome human-computer-interface!Its a set of small blocks, with screens, audio, accelerometers, and wireless communication. With these little blocks, very intuitive and interesting applications are being developed.Check out the Siftables TED talk here.

Further to this, there was the Interaction|09 conference, an interaction design conference, that happened just over the weekend. Unfortunately, I did not make it to the conference - I am still beating myself over it. However, I was able to find some slides from the presentations.